Debut Poetry Collection by Laurel Brett

Laurel Brett's debut poetry collection Penelope in the Car is now available for pre-order directly from Indolent Books. Order yours now!

In production at Indolent Books:

Penelope in the Car
by Laurel Brett

Pre-order yours now at 20% off retail price

Books ship in Q1 2026

Here’s what people are saying about
Laurel Brett’s Penelope in the Car

Reading Laurel Brett’s magnificent debut collection, Penelope in the Car, I was awe-struck by her ability to reach into my heart, somehow calling up my own experiences through the specific, perfect imagery of her own. Here is the fullness of a woman’s life in poems that bring us the universal—the encumbrances of the body, the wonders of time and place, memories of desire and love felt through the grief of loss—through the intimacy and concreteness of the particular. And isn’t that exactly what great poetry gives us?
—Susan Bordo

Laurel Brett is a metaphysical poet for our dark times. Her debut poetry collection, Penelope in the Car, maps both a deeply personal journey through a painful childhood and the loss of a beloved husband, as it nimbly traverses our stark political landscape. Although she draws on her expansive knowledge of literature, art, and history it is her deft touch with what is spoken and what she chooses to assign to subtext that makes these poems memorable “It’s true — at the foot of this peak / the very fabric of the earth unravels. / We each know this. No need / to speak.” And yet, Laurel Brett does speak in this book and we are richer for the words she shares.
—Jennifer Franklin

Laurel Brett’s remarkable debut, Penelope in the Car, unfolds in conversation with history, art, mythology, and the poetic voices that precede her. Reminiscent of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, Brett’s verse charts the pulse of daily life, as it moves through an array of intimacies and fleeting encounters and honors the immediacy of lived experience. These poems inhabit the delicate tension between order and discord, inviting readers to dwell in its unease and to share in the speaker’s fear of falling “from the flat edge of the world.” This is a collection that encourages readers to cherish solitude, worship the creative spirit, persevere through loss, and trust in “the stubbornness of love.”
—Melinda Wilson

Laurel Brett’s debut collection marries the sensual and intellectual with stunning clarity and vulnerability. With passion and wit, she investigates art and myth, Einstein’s ideas of time, the beauty of Long Island, and the grief of widowhood. With the intimacy of a lover, she enters Rothko’s Pink, purple, blue. She makes every flower new as if she were Eve happening upon a garden for the first time. In search of wisdom to give to her grown children, Brett takes us to West Meadow Beach, where “the sunset transcends any postcard — all philosophy”. Penelope in the Car is everything you want from a debut collection: ambitious in scope, unsparingly self-reflective, and fiercely brave.
—Barbara Schwartz

Elegiac and vibrant, Laurel Brett’s Penelope in the Car explores womanhood in a complicated world of ever shifting relationships with people, things, and ideas. Her beautifully crafted poems remind us of the tenderness and vulnerability of the journey. She summons the reader to bear witness to a deeply felt and remembered life, to “the stubbornness of widowhood, / the stubbornness of love, of road, of paint, / of rock, of mind, of pi, refusing resolution.” Brett speaks in a truthful and emotional voice as a woman grappling with injuries, disclosures and wonders. Her poems paint a world in azure, scarlet, vermillion and a “promise of aquamarine” as the reader is awakened to “the silence between silences.”
—Buffy Shutt